Dynamic economic dispatch (DED) aims to schedule the committed generating units' output active power economically over a certain period of time, satisfying operating constraints and load demand in each interval. Valve-point effect, the ramp rate limits, prohibited operation zones (POZs), and transmission losses make the DED a complicated, non-linear constrained problem. Hence, in this paper, imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) is proposed to solve such complicated problem. The feasibility of the proposed method is validated on five and ten units test system for a 24 h time interval. The results obtained by the ICA are compared with other techniques of the literature. These results substantiate the applicability of the proposed method for solving the constrained DED with non-smooth cost functions. Besides, to examine the applicability of the proposed ICA on large power systems, a test case with 54 units is studied. The results confirm the suitability of the ICA for large-scale DED problem. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.